Unlike Windows 3.1, which was a graphical environment that ran on top of MS-DOS, Windows NT is a complete operating system. To the user it looks like Windows 3.1, but it has true multi-threading, built in networking, security, and memory protection.

NT is also designed to be hardware independent. Once the machine specific part - the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) - has been ported to a particular machine, the rest of the operating system should theorertically compile without alteration. A version of NT for DEC's Alpha machines was planned (September 1993).

NT needs a fast 386 or equivalent, at least 12MB of RAM (preferably 16MB) and at least 75MB of free disk space.